Anti-Jewish Bombings in Argentina Still Unsolved

The smoke has not cleared.

On July 18, 1994, a terrorist car bomb devastated a Jewish community center here, killing 87 people and wounding more than 200 in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack outside Israel since the Holocaust.

Nearly two years later, the bombing of the Argentine-Jewish Mutual Assn. and a similar 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy remain unsolved. For the victims’ relatives, the smoke that choked the glass-littered streets around the carnage still clouds an aftermath full of mysteries and conspiracy theories.

“There is no explanation,” said Diana Malamud, who was left a widowed mother of two by the blast at the community center. “When your children ask you where are the people who planted the bomb, and you have to tell them that they are walking the streets like anybody else, it shatters all your social values.”

Last month, an appellate court released on bail a dozen alleged arms traffickers suspected of peripheral involvement in the community center bombing. Investigators continue hunting through a maze of ephemeral leads, motley suspects and ambiguous coincidences.

“We too are frustrated by the impunity,” said Eamon Mullen, a federal prosecutor. “This investigation has been sincere. It has gone wherever it had to go. We have not had the results we wanted. But it is difficult. If we had a conspiracy law for terrorism, we would have 10 suspects in jail for conspiracy right now.”

Although the youthful prosecutors and investigative magistrate are well-regarded, they have been hampered by the chaotic, occasionally suspicious conduct of the police. The investigation has uncovered corruption that may or may not be related to the attack, according to prosecutors, who are focusing on the possibility that police officers helped provide the stolen van used by the suicide bomber.

“We have worked with good police and bad police,” Mullen said. “We have encountered police corruption. And it is a hypothesis that corrupt police could have been involved, perhaps without knowing the van was to be used in a bombing.”

As far as investigators and U.S. and Israeli anti-terrorism experts are concerned, there is little mystery as to the masterminds. Iranian spies directed the sophisticated crimes, officials say. The Hezbollah terrorist organization is said to have carried them out. And prosecutors suspect that a “local connection”--petty gangsters allegedly connected to the security services and right-wing politics--furnished vehicles, intelligence, possibly explosives.

But there is little proof. The justice system lacks the legal tools for such complex cases, officials said.

In a sign of lingering international interest, 22 U.S. congressional representatives sent a recent letter to President Carlos Menem expressing “profound concern over the lack of progress.” The bombings evoke the anti-Semitic violence that occurred during bygone military dictatorships, a specter that this image-conscious young democracy wants to erase.

“We spare no effort, in cooperation with foreign agencies, to discover any clue,” said Fernando Petrella, the deputy foreign minister. Argentine society embraces a Jewish community of more than 250,000, Petrella said.

Anti-terrorism efforts top Argentina’s international agenda, Petrella said. He cited joint training with U.S. law enforcement and a tripartite accord signed last month for tougher vigilance in the lawless area around the border with Brazil and Paraguay. That region is a haven for known Hezbollah operatives, according to Israeli diplomats and others.

International terrorists are difficult to bring to justice. Nonetheless, Sergio Widder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an L.A.-based global watchdog group that fights anti-Semitism, criticized the seeming impunity in the Buenos Aires attacks.

“Terrorists strike all over the world, but nowhere in the world are there attacks like this in which the authors enjoy complete success,” said Widder, the group’s representative in Argentina.

In the most recent frustrating chapter, authorities went after a gang of alleged Argentine arms traffickers. After raiding a military base, investigating magistrate Juan Jose Galeano charged a dozen former and current soldiers who allegedly peddled explosives, bazookas, even old helicopters.

The suspects included members of the “painted faces” group that has launched failed military uprisings here. Some also belonged to a marginal rightist political party, Modin.

Investigators aborted a planned search of the home of a Modin congressman, Emilio Morello, citing his parliamentary immunity. But Morello remains a suspect, according to sources close to the case. Modin leaders say they are convenient scapegoats.

The links to the community center bombing were tenuous but intriguing, according to internal court documents. Telephone wiretaps and undercover witnesses indicated that several suspects said they had information about the attack and were afraid of being implicated, according to the documents.

Jorge Pacifico, a former army explosives expert heard on the wiretaps, attracted attention for an additional reason. He was in a nearby cafe when the explosion tore through the association’s headquarters in the Once garment district, the heart of the Jewish community.

Pacifico admitted joining the crowd as rescue workers and civilians clawed at the rubble of the building, which collapsed upon itself. The nightmare of blood and confusion seemed like “the end of the world,” said Joe Goldman, a U.S.-born writer who rushed to the scene. Goldman has written a book about the case; he is among many who call Pacifico’s presence suspicious.

Pacifico claimed it was a coincidence. He said he went to the cafe to discuss the sale of a BMW with a lawyer affiliated with Modin.

No solid evidence emerged to connect the alleged arms traffickers to the bomb, a mix of explosives similar to the truck bomb used in last year’s terrorist attack in Oklahoma City. An appellate court ordered their release on bail and reduced the weapons charges, enraging the survivors. “The anesthesia of the dictatorship has not worn off,” said Laura Ginsberg, whose husband died in the blast. “It lingers today, affecting everything that has to do with the defense of human life.”

The most concrete remnant of the case is Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a police informant and convicted pimp of Arab descent.

Telleldin’s father was a police commander affiliated with extremists who torched an office of the Jewish association in the city of Mar del Plata in the 1970s, authorities say. The younger Telleldin allegedly operated a ring of “chop shops” that overhauled stolen cars and paid bribes to the police.

Forensic tracing of vehicle parts recovered from the rubble showed that Telleldin supplied the Renault van used as a rolling bomb in the 1994 attack. Before and after the attack, he traveled to the tri-border region, fomenting theories that he was in league with terrorists based in the enclave of recent Middle Eastern immigrants in southern Paraguay.

Telleldin, who is jailed on auto theft charges, testified that he sold the van on July 10 after the registration was altered and the body modified to carry a heavy load.

But authorities are investigating his subsequent statements that he turned it over to two provincial police officers, who have been fired for corruption. Prosecutors are also probing allegations that officers shot at Telleldin during an ambush four days before the bombing.

Telleldin’s murky ties to law enforcement complicated the probe, prosecutor Jose Barbaccia said. “It has been difficult to convince the police that they must bring to light crimes in which they were involved in order for the common good of resolving the [community center bombing] case.”

The criticism directed at law enforcement is magnified by faulty evidence-collecting in both attacks and lack of progress in the investigation of the 1992 assault on the Israeli Embassy. Mysteriously, the embassy’s Argentine police guards disappeared before that car bomb exploded, killing 29 people. Critics recall how police often cleared an area--a phenomenon called “the free zone”--before violence erupted in the days of the dictators.

But Petrella, the deputy foreign minister, rejected such allegations, saying: “I can’t see how institutions with the prestige . . . of the police could be involved. It’s unthinkable.”

Uncovering a local connection could prove a useful building block in both investigations.

“Nobody can come to Buenos Aires from the outside and just buy cars, acquire explosives, arm the bomb, find somewhere to live,” said Alex Ben Zvi, the minister-counselor at the new Israeli Embassy.

Yet experts doubt that locals served as more than street-level accomplices for Hezbollah terrorists and their alleged sponsors, Iranian diplomats. One figure under continuing scrutiny is an Islamic leader who was named cultural attache, thereby acquiring diplomatic immunity, just months before the community center attack.

Several Iranian diplomats were publicly accused in the bombings by an Iranian claiming to be a repentant former spy. The diplomats left Argentina and are still considered suspects, prosecutors said. Although the accuser’s credibility was disputed, he was granted asylum in the United States.

But Iran has denied involvement. And still no one has been charged in either bombing.

So every Monday, Jewish leaders and relatives of the victims congregate in front of the federal court building for a protest ritual known as “Active Memory.” They observe a moment of silence at 9:53 a.m., the time of the community center explosion. They refuse to relent.

“We have to give a worthy answer to our children when they ask us what we did about the deaths of their fathers,” Malamud said. “And we have to do something so that our children are not in danger of being killed in another terrorist attack someday.”